[Kickstarter]: TerraMythos

As a general rule, I do not do solicitations of any kind (*cough* except for free games/MMOs *cough*), but I’ll make exceptions when something amuses me. The Princess of Panchala is the first in a series of YA-ish novels getting Kickstarted by Tom Wright. Part of the premise involves parallel universes, blurring of lines between sci/fi and fantasy, along with a MMORPG setting thrown in there. Based on the sample chapter on the Kickstarter page, I also anticipate there being an “is this girl just schizophrenic?” undertone.

What amused me though, was the paragraph down in the Risks section of the Kickstarter:

The risks for this project are minimal, since the novel is already written and I have a great team working with me. The worst case scenario is that I get hit by a bus, in which case the project would still continue to completion, but the likelihood of completing the remaining books in the series would be significantly reduced.

Ah, understated humor.

In any case, there’s around 20 days left to the Kickstarter if this sounds like your cup of tea.

That’s a really well-written Kickstarter, which makes it all the more surprising to see just how poorly-written the sample chapter is. Did you try to read it? I managed a page before I gave up, which, considering I read a LOT of YA fantasy/SF novels, partly for pleasure, partly for work, suggests this isn’t going to be a particularly shining example of the form.

Also – those pledges! It’s a paperback novel for crying out loud! We do launches for self-published or very small press novels all the time and none of them ever costs more than about £8.99 – what’s that, fifteen dollars absolute tops. You have to pledge $29 before you get a soft-cover copy and even then Tom takes pains to point out you won’t get the mousepad or the magnet you get with the PDF file tier!

I can’t claim to be an expert at this stuff but I suspect you could publish a novel online through Amazon or in hard copy via Lulu.com for a LOT less than $10.500.

Yeah, I read the sample chapter when he approached me. I wasn’t a fan of the “Cheshire cat eyes” bit (and said as much in an email), but in the scheme of things I don’t think it was that bad. There are a lot of novels I’ve read where I hated the beginning or even the first entire novel in the series that ended up being extremely good. For example, I barely made it through the first Malazan: Book the Fallen book and now I’m pretty sure it was my favorite fantasy series ever. I didn’t like the first Wheel of Time or Discworld books either. So, I’m willing to give a pre-editor, sample chapter a pass.

Of course, anything on Kickstarter is going to be a bit more… scrutinized. I’m not sure of the book scene on Kickstarter, but I imagine that $10k is probably a bit of a stretch.